Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday March 21, 2013 @07:40PM
from the working-together dept.

First time accepted submitter GovCheese writes "Canonical, the software company that manages and funds Ubuntu, announced that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will base their national reference architecture for standard operating systems on Ubuntu, and they will call it Kylin. Arguably China is the largest desktop market and the announcement has important implications. Shuttleworth says, 'The release of Ubuntu Kylin brings the Chinese open source community into the global Ubuntu community.'"

If we can learn something from the history is that any openness won't work well in China. On the positive side we may see a number of drivers for peripheral devices being developed for Ubuntu. In any case, I wish them good luck.

Looks like the foundation for the future of Canonical has been laid. They can partner w/ Beijing, have the government sell Ubuntu in China and give them a few cents of all copies, in return for Beijing outlawing all other OSs. That will make Canonical financially stable, and then they can get into other things as well.

Waiting for some bright minds in Congress to start holding hearings into whether Communist OSs like Linux are responsible for cyberterrorism.

Yes!... and quickly indict Shuttleworth for high treason: it's clearly high tech terrorism. Better still he and his family must be treated as al-Aulaqi family was; the president has the authority, after all it's a clear and immediate threat.

Why is it people ascribe *nix (specifically it seems Linux) as Communist software? If anything, in my odd little world it seems more Capitalist than Communist, maybe Socialist; but not Communist. To me it simply seems wrong to say that with Windows I'm running an OS that is installed on physical hardware I FREAKING OWN but I do not 'own' the code to the operating system running on that hardware. Linux is MINE, I can look at it, tweak it, do whatever the hell I want with it; I just do not see how being able

In most of Western Europe, "communists" are the "extreme leftist crazies who liked USSR". Communism itself is often considered a hostile ideology of the enemy.In most of Eastern Europe, "communists" are "scumbags who helped USSR oppress their country". Of course, much of Eastern Europe isn't generally considered part of the "West".In most of Asia that falls under "Western" umbrella, "communists" are the crazies who had to be suppressed so they didn't start shooting wars. Communism itself is often considered

However I can quote you one pretty clear cut example. Here in Finland, we had arguably the best relationship with USSR of all countries that fell under "Western" umbrella, to the point where USSR classified us as "Finland and Warsaw Pact countries" for its trading policies, all while remaining firmly outside all the political wrangling going between NATO and Warsaw Pact.

In recent parliament election, our Left alliance party (Vasemmistoliit

You don't understand Communism. In Communism (not state Socialism like in the USSR but the kind Marx described), the workers own the means of production and control their own productivity. You and your computer are very much like that. Furthermore, Linux belongs to you with respect to how you can use it and modify it and to nobody in the sense that everybody can have as many copies as they want.

In Capitalism, the means of production belongs to financiers and say what you will and won't do with it.

There is a big difference between belonings and means of production. Under capitalism, very few people own means of production (factories, businesses, etc.) and those who are concentrated in large corporations. And if you think of your computer as a tiny means of production, look how much ownership is slowly being taking away by being locked into platforms and walled gardens. If you have a Chromebook, who owns your data? You or Google?

Yes, I understand Capitalism fairly well.Communism, in its truest sense, is the utopia form of society, being very inclusive. The biggest problem with it is human nature, which pretty much ensures that it'll be subverted and exploited. It's what we should be working towards as a species (until something better can be formulated, which it probably will at some point).Capitalism is confrontational and warlike, and very exclusive. It's an evolution of the strongest (not necessarily the optimum) under certai

I wouldn't put so much faith in a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia articles vary wildly in quality. Apparently the one you're quoting is poorly written unless you're misrepresenting it. Communism and Capitalism are complex subjects. The first thing you should understand is that between them, they don't exhaust all the possibilities by a long shot.

CAPITALISM is an economic system wherein the role of CAPITAL is paramount. What you described is called "private property" and existed literally AGES before the

In my previous comment I copied and pasted the first sentence word for word from the Wikipedia article so that you could interpret it. I have already interpreted it, and my initial comment in this thread was almost exactly the same. Allow me to post the first sentence from the Wikipedia article again (so that you can interpret it again), since you clearly think my one sentence is/was totally off base:

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of capital goods and the means of production, with the creation of goods and services for profit.[1][2] Elements central to capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, and a price system.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

That much is correct.

Now, allow me to post my original comment (which I again re-posted in my last comment so that you could compare both), in order to tell whether or not I have misinterpreted the Wikipedia statement (I hate being repetitive, but don't tell me I am misinterpreting the english language when you aren't even reading my comments):

In Capitalism each agent within the system maintains private ownership over its belongings, and has the freedom to choose its activities within the system.

Are you really going to sit here and tell me I egregiously misinterpreted what was written on Wikipedia? Like, actually?

In terms of counterintelligence, a smart move on China's part. Although Canonical is UK based, it's significantly easier to migrate from Ubuntu to any other distro than from Windows or OSX, should the need arise. I'm actually quite surprised that Iran isn't doing the same thing. You don't even need to have backdoors in computers of the individuals you're interested in; those of their families are already a big step ahead.

The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research “Red Flag” Linux. It was a failure. I only saw it once. I happened to be in a shop in Xian and I saw it on a computer. Before I could comment on it the sales man assured me that if I purchased the computer they would put a copy of Windows on it “so it could be useful.”

As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).

Free as in speech has no ring to the Chinese ear. The issue is broken down to choosing between two flavours of free beer.

That's generally the case. Windows may not be free in any sense of the word, but the cost of the license is included in the cost of the computer. The only time you ever actually see a price is if you're upgrading or building your own computer.

China has an ARM license now, and several ARM chipset manufacturers. Low power requirements makes this a good fit as their power infrastructure is struggling already. As open source it leaves open the potential for home grown app development. Finally, it is time for China to get off of XP and the modern hardware and software proprietary platforms are not piracy friendly. Going legit opens up export potentials for China. Pretty obvious really.

The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research “Red Flag” Linux. It was a failure. I only saw it once. I happened to be in a shop in Xian and I saw it on a computer. Before I could comment on it the sales man assured me that if I purchased the computer they would put a copy of Windows on it “so it could be useful.”

As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).

Free as in speech has no ring to the Chinese ear. The issue is broken down to choosing between two flavours of free beer.

You might be surprised to learn that there are already thousands of Ubuntu stores and Kiosks in China, selling laptops with Ubuntu preloaded. China was a natural fit for Canonical because it's already a bigger market for them than the US.

I was in several computer markets (as you know, "store" does not quite describe the situation in a Chinese building of small shops) last weekend. I saw no linux.

That is not only in my city; but in the many I visit. If there is an Ubuntu store or Kosk in Shanghai I would like to know where it is, just so I can visit it (I am not in Shanghai; but, it is only a few hours travel away). I will also be in HK next week, near Wan Chi, If there are

I was in several computer markets (as you know, "store" does not quite describe the situation in a Chinese building of small shops) last weekend. I saw no linux.

That is not only in my city; but in the many I visit. If there is an Ubuntu store or Kosk in Shanghai I would like to know where it is, just so I can visit it (I am not in Shanghai; but, it is only a few hours travel away). I will also be in HK next week, near Wan Chi, If there are any in that district I would also be interested.

I don't know where exactly, and even "thousands" scattered about China isn't particularly common. Admittedly, my information comes from statistics quoted in a presentation (alongside some pictures of the kiosks).

You might be surprised to learn that there are already thousands of Ubuntu stores and Kiosks in China, selling laptops with Ubuntu preloaded.

I would be surprised, all right, given that Canonical has just announced chinese stores. Seems like a typical Chinese inflation of the fact that Dell is selling Ubuntu-loaded laptops in 220 stores in China. 220 becomes thousands!

As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).

It's extremely frustrating when I see people pirate something when there are free alternatives. One could argue that the free/FOSS alternatives for certain classes of software aren't good enough, but there are enough cases nowadays where the quality of the free stuff is sufficient enough to make this something of a cop-out.

A Google engineer recently blogged about his experiences in Vietnam and how computer science was taught there (http://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/ [fraser.name]). The story itself is interesting enough (when it comes to computer science Vietnamese kids kick the ass of American students, to the point where half of the students in one particular grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process), but he mentions this:

By grade 3 they are learning to how to use Microsoft Windows. Vietnam is a 100% Windows XP monoculture. Probably all with the same serial number. However, given that a copy of Windows costs one month's salary, it's easy to understand.

Touch-typing is taught using Microsoft Word. As with all their software, it is in English, which adds to the difficulty at that age.

Linux/LibreOffice is free, and yet still ignored. Obviously they aren't concerned about the BSA breaking down their doors to arrest everyone (yet), but it'd be nice if more countries with limited funds learnt the same basic techniques with more open source software. If you can't even give away your software, then Microsoft clearly have nothing to fear.

I was out in India in 2007 and visited an orphanage school. They were teaching photoshop to what looked like 8 year-olds. I spoke to the teacher there (this was in fact before I had any experience of linux myself). He told me how Microsoft officials visited the school and requested the fee for the Windows XP license x the number of pupils. The figure was in the thousands of dollars - probably several times the school's whole budget for the year. Overnight, he wiped all of the c

The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research âoeRed Flagâ Linux. It was a failure.

Red Flag, as far as I remember, is a clone of Redhat; and while Redhat has many good qualities, it is more of a server OS and less of a desktop one. Ubuntu is not a favourite of mine either, but it is certainly bleeding edge, if anything, and wouldn't be at all surprised if this could actually take off with the Chinese. Put on top of that the fact that Linux's multiligual support is in fact superior to Windows'. No, I am quite optimistic about this.

I don't know - when I watch my children's use of computer games, I can see that they clearly prefer the ones that are free, online and browser based. They seem to work on both Windows, MacOS and Linux.

They are not free because the developer intended them to be free, or browser based. They are free because they have been cracked and are available for free from numerous websites (on another note, that is part of the reason torrents never really caught on in China, the stuff can be downloaded from normal sites). Just do a search on Baidu; or check tudou.com.

Yeah right, and they all look the same to you anyway, am I right? You just lost my respect.

It is easy to cast aside observations that conflict with our values as the product of a mistaken mind; however, take note that I am the person who lives

The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research “Red Flag” Linux. It was a failure. I only saw it once. I happened to be in a shop in Xian and I saw it on a computer. Before I could comment on it the sales man assured me that if I purchased the computer they would put a copy of Windows on it “so it could be useful.”

As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).

Free as in speech has no ring to the Chinese ear. The issue is broken down to choosing between two flavours of free beer.

I always wondered what happened to it - Red Flag Linux. Looks like that making OSs wasn't a strong point of the Chinese, even if the source code was available to them.

So this partnership with Ubuntu makes sense. Also, as symbolset pointed out above, Chinese companies now make ARM based CPUs, and I'd add that they make MIPS based CPUs as well. Computers based on those would be the price kings, and while Ubuntu could easily be ported to run on those, for Windows, even Windows 8, would have an uphill ta

Possibly the difference is Canonical has a superstar jetset personality in front of it who's even been to space.

I'm not kidding. That'll help getting the crucial first few seconds of foot-in-door attention with mainstream people outside and inside government.

Also it's (sorta) South African. China is investing massively in Africa, and Africa has never been an Enemy. Together these are good hooks and waay better than from America/Finland and Stallman/Torvalis. Those are no hook at all.

I wonder what happened to Red Flag Linux? Red Flag was China's official Linux distro and was supposed to replace Microsoft Windows. Interesting that China is partnering with a U.S. company when they are trying to be independent in all other arenas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux [wikipedia.org]

This is actually a pretty good move for China. China can't trust all the signed binaries from Microsoft , especially after the Microsoft certificates were used to sign the flame malware. With all the cyber-saber-rattling in Washington, its possible they could do the same thing to China with a Chinese Language patch. This way at lest you can compile the source yourself and check for weird additions.

In exchange for this, Ubuntu should become a lot more popular in a country that is currently producing the most volume of Unix systems. For us Linux users, it means that more drivers will be available before release, and they will continue to manufacture motherboards that don't require us to secure boot into Windows 8. I just hope any espionage China uses on its own people doesn't get committed back into the Ubuntu repo.

So if China wants it, I'm sure they have it. I think this is more of a "We have to have our own thing since China Strong!" and crap like that. China seems to have ego issues about not having home grown stuff (they aren't they only country that does) and wants to have their own everything. However turns out they aren't always equipped to develop it from scratch, so they often start with something else.

Similar to their "Loongson" microprocessor. It was to be a Chinese CPU, home grown and all that. In actuality they ripped off, and then later licensed, the MIPS architecture and it is a MIPS64 based chip running at 1GHz on a 65nm process.

This sounds similar. "Hey we want an OS, but writing one from scratch is a ton of work and we don't really have enough of the skillset around to do it well. So let's get a Linux distro to start on, and then make it our 'own'."

Does anyone compile their own Windows? If you don't compile it then the source code that you see is just for show.

Hm, I am curious if orgs like the NSA do compile the source and compare their binary to the official one, they wouldn't have a licence to distribute if the binaries differed, but if they were identical that seems pretty safe. If you're serious about security you compile and distribute your own version of the software yourself.

It's a "qílín" ("qinlin", if Slashdot eats the markup): a mythical Chinese creature that is "said to appear with the imminent arrival or passing of a wise sage or an illustrious ruler." Make of that, what you will.

Where's the announcement from China? Canonical has a long history of bullshit announcements that some big vendor is going to use their product. They've made that claim in the past for both Asus and Dell. In both cases, the Canonical product never appeared on those platforms, or was a very minor niche announcement.

I'm a Mint user-- Mint's downstream from Ubuntu-- so I can attest to the quality & hard work that its programmers & devs have put into it. My beef is with the direction Ubuntu is taking; drinking the tablet Kool-Aid, and as I mentioned before the adware. As for their revenues, the way to do it right is to make a jim-dandy OS, and sell the support. If I want adware I can get a Windows box.

I think that as a company matures it is forced to find additional sources of revenue and often this revenue comes from those that are locked in i.e. its customers. Ubuntu's granddaddy - Debian is a good way to skip all the ad-ware that Ubuntu is starting to add.

If Debian stable included a recent version of KDE and the latest NVidia drivers (since I need 310.32 for my card specifically), I'd switch to it immediately. I'm using Fedora now only because a) it includes KDE 4.10 and b) it's not Ubuntu.

You do realise there are other choices of distro, don't you? Your nvidia drivers should install on any system so long as you have the kernel headers. (I haven't needed them for a few years, since the free driver works for me.) I'm running KDE 4.10 on Slackware 14.0 and it's as sweet as I could ask for. Slack is what I started with back in '94, and despite having spent extended periods working with other just about all of the major distros (and even rolled my own LFS for a while), I keep coming back to it.

Couldn't agree more! If not for Ubuntu, I'd probably still be stuck with Windows. I tried installing Debian, a couple other distros, and FreeBSD. When they worked out fine, I found it was all command line and I had a hard time getting online & installing Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, or KDE. So I just stuck with Ubuntu. I'd really love to get into FreeBSD, but hey... I'm just a web developer, I don't need to spend a lot of my time trying to get my system to work and I don't want to spend a lot of my time on that either. I often think part of the reason Linux isn't more popular is because it almost always requires the Linux newbie to learn the hard way first, in order to use the system in a more intuitive way (GUI). And when there's OS's like Windows & Mac, that don't require the hard way to be the 1st thing you learn, then why waste the time going through all the hoops? That's how I see it. That's what held me back for about 12 years.

I also started out with Ubuntu (8.04), but thankfully the first distro I tried after I got fed up with its issues in early '10 was Simply Mepis [mepis.org], which has to be the easiest one ever. After I'd gotten used to it, I felt comfortable enough trying out OpenSuSE, Fedora, etc. to enjoy distro-hopping and start learning the commandline for fun since it wasn't as necessary as it had been for me in Ubuntu. If I'd gone straight for Debian either before or after Ubuntu, though, I'm pretty sure I would've given up on

Couldn't agree more! If not for Ubuntu, I'd probably still be stuck with Windows. I tried installing Debian, a couple other distros, and FreeBSD. When they worked out fine, I found it was all command line and I had a hard time getting online & installing Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, or KDE. So I just stuck with Ubuntu. I'd really love to get into FreeBSD, but hey... I'm just a web developer, I don't need to spend a lot of my time trying to get my system to work and I don't want to spend a lot of my time on that either. I often think part of the reason Linux isn't more popular is because it almost always requires the Linux newbie to learn the hard way first, in order to use the system in a more intuitive way (GUI). And when there's OS's like Windows & Mac, that don't require the hard way to be the 1st thing you learn, then why waste the time going through all the hoops? That's how I see it. That's what held me back for about 12 years.

FreeBSD now has a desktop distro called PC-BSD, that is aimed solely at the desktop, which supports several DEs and which has a far improved way of updating packages that rivals even Debian. It's no longer just command line, unless you are administering a server. If you don't need a server, than on the BSD side, PC-BSD is right for you. Ubuntu is okay if you like Unity, and if you prefer one of the other DEs, you could try out Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu or Mint/Cinnamon or Mint/KDE or Mint/LDXE or Mint/XF

The installer's only one side of things though. There are still lots of annoying bugs and edge cases that simply don't get any attention by anyone apart from the occasional bug report that's never acknowledged. Don't get me wrong I appreciate a good installer - make it easy and it's easier for a novice user to start experimenting with Linux. Just don't expect them to remain when they start to compare the levels of polish to the proprietary systems with far more support.

Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried? I fell for the "Ubuntu is the only user-friendly distro" FUD for my first two years as a Linux user, and when the Ubuntu releases became intolerably unstable on my computer starting in late '09, I almost gave up on Linux entirely because I was so certain all other distros were a nightmare for non-geeks & had forums full of snarky asshats.

Thankfully I had a few live CDs I'd been thinking about trying when an Ubuntu update rendered my hard driv

I second this. SUSE is a damn great distro and gives the best KDE4 experience out-of-the-box of ANY Linux. It's easy to install and detects almost everything I've thrown at it (TV cards and wireless might be a problem) and is very user firendly. It gets a bad rep here in/. culture because of the M$ deal. For that matter Fedora's getting a bad rep because of their UEFI Secure Boot deal with M$. Slashdot culture is a funny thing. Criticize Apple and it's like kicking over an anthill. Now apparently ditto Ubu

Actually, from the days of Caldera, most Linux distros were fine in terms of the installation. Problems came if X11 didn't have support for that video card driver (rare) or the network card wasn't supported. In fact, I ran into the latter problem most of the time, and that alone aborted my attempts to install Linux. It wasn't until Ubuntu was out that the Linux distros by & large had their act together on network cards, but this time, they were missing on Wi-Fi, just when most of the market had trans

Agreed. Although I'm pretty comfortable with basic installers (or none at all for that matter), I remember being quite impressed with RedHat and Mandrake back in the late '90s, and I'm certain it hasn't got any harder in the years since. Mandrake (7.0?) in particular was probably intuitive and bombproof enough for just about any non-geek to install. I would have thought most of the more popular modern distros would well and truly have it together by now. (Though I read recently that Fedora's has taken a tur

For a change, I have mod points, but I'd rather reply than add a random -1 = I disagree. It's no secret that Canonical wants to make money. Unlike competing Linux distros with a commercial and a free version, Canonical refused to split their distro in two. This decision has hampered their financial growth, but helped their community growth. I applaud them for it. Canonical has some financial interest but is clearly willing to sacrifice earnings to be good world citizens. Big American companies passed up valuable opportunities to partner with Canonical. HP and Dell, screwed up, though Dell at least gave it a an incompetent effort. The Chinese and Canonical working together makes sense. The Chinese like to steal whatever they can, but Canonical has already offered everything for free. There's nothing to steal. For example, Lenovo just sold me a $1900 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Touch with a bad display, and they knew it. Rather than eating the lost from buying thousands of bad displays, they decided to screw over all their ThinkPad customers in America. It's the Chinese way. The poor IBM employees supporting the ThinkPad line are screwed. Most companies can't even imagine a productive relationship with the Chinese government. However, there's no downside to Canonical, and tons of upside for China. If a billion Chinese benefit, and Canonical grows from a tiny company to a medium company, everyone wins. Mr Shuttleworth has always cared more about helping a billion people than making another hundred million. The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity. I get so tired of how people prefer to tear down good work. What have you done to improve the human condition? Does it compare to Mark's work?

"The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity."

Mark is richer than 99% of the people here on Slashdot, but he's barely a billionaire, nowhere near the wealth of Mark Z, the Google twins, let alone Bill G. The Chinese have a cash pile that runs into the hundreds of billions. They have no need for Shuttleworth's generosity.

As a general rule, IBM offers no support for ThinkPads (and for all intents and purposes are no longer affiliated in any way with the ThinkPad brand) unless some specific company has decided to purchase Lenovo ThinkPads but would prefer to have them serviced by IBM.

Basically, IBM does not actively sell or service the ThinkPad in any capacity.

Occasionally ThinkPad deals are tossed into large package deals with other IBM products and services, but IBM does not maintain any preference in this respect. IBM

The other upside to this is that in China, Canonical can port Ubuntu to non-x86 CPUs such as the Loongson and Allwinner. They can make their distro available on the Lemote laptops - similar to gNewSense. In China, while sticking to the GPL, they can sell Ubuntu on such computers and have a captive market, since even Windows 8 won't run on those. They could spawn a big developer community in China to help them at least gain marketshare in that market, if not anywhere else. Unlike in the West, where we f